Because The Body by Victor Henry

When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.
                                                     Jean-Paul Sartre

Knows the score and the brain’s response system,
The amygdala, is damaged,
Ecstasy hardly ever turns up now, and when it does

It comes disfigured, disguised as an intrusive memory,
A memory relived in a series of treacherous thoughts,
the delayed anguish of terrible traumas,

During days and nights without sleep, steeped in hypervigilance,
I welcome the barrel of my Glock, suck on it slowly, like it’s a lollypop,
Welcome the blade of my K-Bar knife, the blade inserted

Between the second and third ribs, then thrust deeply,
Breaking bone, until pain and misery merge, relieving the guilt of my years.
In another setting, I taste the toxicity of a cyanide pill,

A peaceful and painless death, hiding behind one of fate’s three doors.
The kind the downed American flyer in a 1940s b&w WW II film popped
Just before he was about to be captured by a squad of advancing Germans

I’ve been trained, so I’m ready for the adrenalin rush, the pure hatred, the firefight.

My poetry and prose poems have appeared in Misfit Magazine, Dead Snakes, Homestead Review, The Paterson Literary Review, Red River Review, and Slipstream, among others. My book What They Wanted was published last November 11th, Veterans Day, by FutureCycle Press in Lexington, Kentucky. http://victor-henry.net/